Travis CI, Python 3.3, Buildout

I had the hardest time configuring Travis CI for several Python 3.3 packages. I think it may have been because they’re all PEP 420 namespace packages. The strange thing is that the tests would pass for some of the packages but not others.

I ended up creating a package (which I lovingly named travisty) so my repos wouldn’t be cluttered with hundreds of superfluous commits recording my failed attempts to get things working. I got pretty frustrated and almost gave up on Travis entirely.

There was a post on Planet Python recently about problems with Python 3 and virtualenv, and I’m guessing the issue is something related to that and not Travis specifically, but I never did actually figure it out.

Instead, I tried installing my packages using Buildout (which I prefer over virtualenv for development anyway), and that magically worked. It kind of bugs me that I don’t know why it works and the bare virtualenv doesn’t, but at this point I’m just happy that it does.